In the manufacture and packaging of articles, such as blow-molded articles, including hollow, plastic containers or bottles, a conveyor arrangement is often used to convey the articles between the manufacturing/packaging stations. Advances in article compositions, such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET), permit the manufacture of strong, lightweight articles. Additionally, due to PET articles possessing satisfactory barrier to gas transmission, primarily oxygen and carbon dioxide, they are often used as containers for carbonated soft drinks.
However, there are challenges associated with the manufacture and use of PET articles. For example, PET articles exhibit a mutual “sticking” effect, or susceptibility to cohesively group together. This behavior can make high-speed handling of the PET articles difficult. For example, the effect of this sticking phenomenon with preforms packed into a box is a lower than optimum packing density and correspondingly higher transportation cost per preform. The effect further manifests itself when unloading these boxes onto a blowing line, where the preforms tend not to flow smoothly into the automatic unscramblers and other register machinery. This can then result in less than optimum preform feed rates to the blowing machine. Bottles sticking together reduce conveying efficiency, and hence, overall filling speed on a filling line, and create further challenges during bottle palletizing/depalletizing. In sheet manufacture, sticking effects create problems in sheet unrolling and cutting after storage, as well as with de-nesting of thermoformed articles.
Accordingly, there is a need for an apparatus and method for separating articles susceptible to cohesive grouping associated with the manufacture and/or packaging of articles.